“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Oysters!” said Mr. Hunter. “That’s how it began.” There was a fly swatter on the floor beside Mr. Hunter’s chair, and a few feet in front of his chair was an old kitchen table with a chipped enamel top. He suddenly reached down and grabbed the swatter and stood up and took a step toward the table, on which a fly had lit. His shadow fell on the fly, and the fly flew away. Mr. Hunter stared wildly into space for several moments, looking for the fly and muttering angrily, and then he sat back down, still holding the swatter.
“It’s hard to believe nowadays, the water’s so dirty,” he continued, “but up until about the year 1800 there were tremendous big beds of natural-growth oysters all around Staten Island—in the Lower Bay, in the Arthur Kill, in the Kill van Kull. Some of the richest beds of oysters in the entire country were out in the lower part of the Lower Bay, the part known as Raritan Bay. Most of them were on shoals, under ten to twenty feet of water. They were supposed to be public beds, open to anybody, but they were mainly worked by Staten Islanders, and the Staten Islanders considered they owned them. Between 1800 and 1820, all but the very deepest of these beds gradually petered out. They had been raked and scraped until they weren’t worth working any more. But the Staten Islanders didn’t give up. What they did, they began to bring immature oysters from other localities and put them on the best of the old beds and leave them there until they reached market size, which took from one to four years, all according to how mature the oysters were to begin with. Then they’d rake them up, or tong them up, and load them on boats, and send them up the bay to the wholesalers in New York. They took great pains with these oysters. They cleaned the empty shells and bottom trash off the beds that they put them on, and they spread them out as evenly as possible. Handled this way, oysters grew faster than they did all scrouged together on natural beds. Also, they grew more uniform in size and shape. Also, they had a better flavor. Also, they brought higher prices, premium prices. The center of the business was the little town of Prince’s Bay, over on the outside shore. There’s not much to Prince’s Bay now, but it used to be one of the busiest oyster ports on the Atlantic Coast.
“At first, the Staten Islanders used sloops and bought their seed stock close by, in bays in New Jersey and Long Island, but the business grew very fast, and in a few years a good many of them were using schooners that could hold five thousand bushels and were making regular trips to Maryland and Virginia. Some went into inlets along the ocean side of the Eastern Shore, and some went into Chesapeake Bay. They bought from local oystermen who worked natural beds in the public domain, and they usually had to visit a whole string of little ports and landings before they got a load. At that time, there were quite a few free Negroes among the oystermen on the Eastern Shore, especially in Worcester County, Maryland, on the upper part of Chincoteague Bay, and the Staten Island captains occasionally hired gangs of them to make the trip North and help distribute the oysters on the beds. Now and then, a few would stay behind on Staten Island for a season or two and work on empty beds, cleaning them off and getting them ready for new seed stock. Late in the 1830s or early in the 1840s, a number of these men left their homes in and around Snow Hill, Maryland, the county seat of Worcester County, and came up to Staten Island to live. They brought their families, and they settled over here in the Sandy Ground section. The land was cheap in Sandy Ground, and it was in easy walking distance of Prince’s Bay, and a couple of Negro families were already living over here, a family named Jackson and a family named Henry. The records of our church go back to 1850, and they show the names of most of the original men from Snow Hill. Three of them were Purnells—Isaac Purnell, George Purnell, and Littleton Purnell. Two were Lambdens, spelled L-a-m-b-d-e-n, only their descendants changed the spelling to L-a-n-d-i-n—Landin. One was a Robbins, and one was a Bishop, and one was a Henman. The Robbins family died out or moved away many years ago, but Purnells, Landins, Bishops, and Henmans still live in Sandy Ground. They’ve always been the main Sandy Ground families. There’s a man from Sandy Ground who works for a trucking concern in New York, drives trailer trucks, and he’s driven through Maryland many times, and stopped in Snow Hill, and he says there’s still people down there with these names, plenty of them, white and Negro. Especially Purnells and Bishops. Every second person you run into in Snow Hill, just about, he says, is either a Purnell or a Bishop, and there’s one little crossroad town near Snow Hill that’s named Bishop and another one that’s named Bishopville. Through the years, other Negro families came to Sandy Ground and settled down and intermarried with the families from Snow Hill. Some came from the South, but the majority came from New York and New Jersey and other places in the North. Such as the Harris family, the Mangin family, the Fish family, the Williams family, the Finney family, and the Roach family.”
All of a sudden, Mr. Hunter leaned forward in his chair as far as he could go and brought the fly swatter down on the table. This time, he killed the fly.
“I wasn’t born in Sandy Ground myself,” he continued. “I came here when I was a boy. My mother and my stepfather brought me here. Two or three of the original men from Snow Hill were still around then, and I knew them. They were old, old men. As a matter of fact, they were about as old as I am now. And the widows of several others were still around. Two of those old widows lived near us, and they used to come to see my mother and sit by the kitchen range and talk and talk, and I used to like to listen to them. The main thing they talked about was the early days in Sandy Ground—how poor everybody had been, and how hard everybody had had to work, the men and the women. The men all worked by the day for the white oystermen in Prince’s Bay. They went out in skiffs and anchored over the beds and stood up in the skiffs from sunup to sundown, raking oysters off the bottom with big old claw-toothed rakes that were made of iron and weighed fourteen pounds and had handles on them twenty-four feet long. The women all washed. They washed for white women in Prince’s Bay and Rossville and Tottenville. And there wasn’t a real house in the whole of Sandy Ground. Most of the families lived in one-room shacks with lean-tos for the children. In the summer, they ate what they grew in their gardens. In the winter, they ate oysters until they couldn’t stand the sight of them.
“When I came here, early in the 1880s that had all changed. By that time, Sandy Ground was really quite a prosperous little place. Most of the men were still breaking their backs raking oysters by the day, but several of them had saved their money and worked up to where they owned and operated pretty good-sized oyster sloops and didn’t take orders from anybody. Old Mr. Dawson Landin was the first to own a sloop. He owned a forty-footer named the Pacific. He was the richest man in the settlement, and he took the lead in everything. Still and all, people liked him and looked up to him; most of us called him Uncle Daws. His brother, Robert Landin, owned a thirty-footer named the Independence, and Mr. Robert’s son-in-law, Francis Henry, also owned a thirty-footer. His was named the Fannie Ferne. And a few others owned sloops. There were still some places here and there in the Arthur Kill and the Kill van Kull where you could rake up natural-growth seed oysters if you spliced two rake handles together and went down deep enough, and that’s what these men did. They sold the seed to the white oystermen, and they made out all right. In those days, the oyster business used oak baskets by the thousands, and some of the Sandy Ground men had got to be good basket-makers. They went into the woods around here and cut white-oak saplings and split them into strips and soaked the strips in water and wove them into bushel baskets that would last for years. Also, several of the men had become blacksmiths. They made oyster rakes and repaired them, and did all kinds of ironwork for the boats. One of those men was Mr. William Bishop, and his son, Joe Bishop, still runs a blacksmith shop over on Woodrow Road. It’s the last real old-time blacksmith shop left on the island.
“The population of Sandy Ground was bigger then than it is now, and the houses were newer and nicer-looking. Every family owned the house they lived in, and a
little bit of land. Not much—an acre and a half, two acres, three acres. I guess Uncle Daws had the most, and he only had three and three-quarter acres. But what they had, they made every inch of it count. They raised a few pigs and chickens, and kept a cow, and had some fruit trees and grapevines, and planted a garden. They planted a lot of Southern stuff, such as butter beans and okra and sweet potatoes and mustard greens and collards and Jerusalem artichokes. There were flowers in every yard, and rosebushes, and the old women exchanged seeds and bulbs and cuttings with each other. Back then, this was a big strawberry section. The soil in Sandy Ground is ideal for strawberries. All the white farmers along Bloomingdale Road grew them, and the people in Sandy Ground took it up; you can grow a lot of strawberries on an acre. In those days, a river steamer left New Brunswick, New Jersey, every morning, and came down the Raritan River and entered the Arthur Kill and made stops at Rossville and five or six other little towns on the kill, and then went on up to the city and docked at the foot of Barclay Street, right across from Washington Market. And early every morning during strawberry season the people would box up their strawberries and take them down to Rossville and put them on the steamer and send them off to market. They’d lay a couple of grape leaves on top of each box, and that would bring out the beauty of the berries, the green against the red. Staten Island strawberries had the reputation of being unusually good, the best on the market, and they brought fancy prices. Most of them went to the big New York hotels. Some of the families in Sandy Ground, strawberries were about as important to them as oysters. And every family put up a lot of stuff, not only garden stuff, but wild stuff—wild-grape jelly, and wild-plum jelly, and huckleberries. If it was a good huckleberry year, they’d put up enough huckleberries to make deep-dish pies all winter. And when they killed their hogs, they made link sausages and liver pudding and lard. Some of the old women even made soap. People looked after things in those days. They patched and mended and made do, and they kept their yards clean, and they burned their trash. And they taught their children how to conduct themselves. And they held their heads up; they were as good as anybody, and better than some. And they got along with each other; they knew each other’s peculiarities and took them into consideration. Of course, this was an oyster town, and there was always an element that drank and carried on and didn’t have any more moderation than the cats up the alley, but the great majority were good Christians who walked in the way of the Lord, and loved Him, and trusted Him, and kept His commandments. Everything in Sandy Ground revolved around the church. Every summer, we put up a tent in the churchyard and held a big camp meeting, a revival. We owned the tent. We could get three or four hundred people under it, sitting on sawhorse benches. We’d have visiting preachers, famous old-time African Methodist preachers, and they’d preach every night for a week. We’d invite the white oystermen to come and bring their families, and a lot of them would. Everybody was welcome. And once a year, to raise money for church upkeep, we’d put on an ox roast, what they call a barbecue nowadays. A Southern man named Steve Davis would do the roasting. There were tricks to it that only he knew. He’d dig a pit in the churchyard, and then a little off to one side he’d burn a pile of hickory logs until he had a big bed of red-hot coals, and then he’d fill the pit about half full of coals, and then he’d set some iron rods across the pit, and then he’d lay a couple of sides of beef on the rods and let them roast. Every now and then, he’d shovel some more coals into the pit, and then he’d turn the sides of beef and baste them with pepper sauce, or whatever it was he had in that bottle of his, and the beef would drip and sputter and sizzle, and the smoke from the hickory coals would flavor it to perfection. People all over the South Shore would set aside that day and come to the African Methodist ox roast. All the big oyster captains in Prince’s Bay would come. Captain Phil De Waters would come, and Captain Abraham Manee and Captain William Haughwout and Captain Peter Polworth and good old Captain George Newbury, and a dozen others. And we’d eat and laugh and joke with each other over who could hold the most.
“All through the eighties, and all through the nineties, and right on up to around 1910, that’s the way it was in Sandy Ground. Then the water went bad. The oystermen had known for a long time that the water in the Lower Bay was getting dirty, and they used to talk about it, and worry about it, but they didn’t have any idea how bad it was until around 1910, when reports began to circulate that cases of typhoid fever had been traced to the eating of Staten Island oysters. The oyster wholesalers in New York were the unseen powers in the Staten Island oyster business; they advanced the money to build boats and buy Southern seed stock. When the typhoid talk got started, most of them decided they didn’t want to risk their money any more, and the business went into a decline, and then, in 1916, the Department of Health stepped in and condemned the beds, and that was that. The men in Sandy Ground had to scratch around and look for something else to do, and it wasn’t easy. Mr. George Ed Henman got a job working on a garbage wagon for the city, and Mr. James McCoy became the janitor of a public school, and Mr. Jacob Finney went to work as a porter on Ellis Island, and one did this and one did that. A lot of the life went out of the settlement, and a kind of don’t-care attitude set in. The church was especially hard hit. Many of the young men and women moved away, and several whole families, and the membership went down. The men who owned oyster sloops had been the main support of the church, and they began to give dimes where they used to give dollars. Steve Davis died, and it turned out nobody else knew how to roast an ox, so we had to give up the ox roasts. For some years, we put on clambakes instead, and then clams got too expensive, and we had to give up the clambakes.
“The way it is now, Sandy Ground is just a ghost of its former self. There’s a disproportionate number of old people. A good many of the big old rambling houses that used to be full of children, there’s only old men and old women living in them now. And you hardly ever see them. People don’t sit on their porches in Sandy Ground as much as they used to, even old people, and they don’t do much visiting. They sit inside, and keep to themselves, and listen to the radio or look at television. Also, in most of the families in Sandy Ground where the husband and wife are young or middle-aged, both of them go off to work. If there’s children, a grandmother or an old aunt or some other relative stays home and looks after them. And they have to travel good long distances to get to their work. The women mainly work in hospitals, such as Sea View, the big t.b. hospital way up in the middle of the island, and I hate to think of the time they put in riding those rattly old Staten Island buses and standing at bus stops in all kinds of weather. The men mainly work in construction, or in factories across the kill in New Jersey. You hear their cars starting up early in the morning, and you hear them coming in late at night. They make eighty, ninety, a hundred a week, and they take all the overtime work they can get; they have to, to pay for those big cars and refrigerators and television sets. Whenever something new comes out, if one family gets one, the others can’t rest until they get one too. And the only thing they pay cash for is candy bars. For all I know, they even buy them on the installment plan. It’ll all end in a mess one of these days. The church has gone way down. People say come Sunday they’re just too tired to stir. Most of the time, only a handful of the old reliables show up for Sunday-morning services, and we’ve completely given up Sunday-evening services. Oh, sometimes a wedding or a funeral will draw a crowd. As far as gardens, nobody in Sandy Ground plants a garden any more beyond some old woman might set out a few tomato plants and half the time she forgets about them and lets them wilt. As far as wild stuff, there’s plenty of huckleberries in the woods around here, high-bush and low-bush, and oceans of blackberries, and I even know where there’s some beach plums, but do you think anybody bothers with them? Oh, no!”
· · ·
Mr. Hunter stood up. “I’ve rested long enough,” he said. “Let’s go on over to the cemetery.” He went down the back steps, and I followed him. He looked under the po
rch and brought out a grub hoe and handed it to me. “We may need this,” he said. “You take it, if you don’t mind, and go on around to the front of the house. I’ll go back inside and lock up, and I’ll meet you out front in just a minute.”
I went around to the front, and looked at the roses on the trellised bush beside the porch. They were lush pink roses. It was a hot afternoon, and when Mr. Hunter came out, I was surprised to see that he had put on a jacket, and a double-breasted jacket at that. He had also put on a black necktie and a black felt hat. They were undoubtedly his Sunday clothes, and he looked stiff and solemn in them.
“I was admiring your rosebush,” I said.
“It does all right,” said Mr. Hunter. “It’s an old bush. When it was getting a start, I buried bones from the table around the roots of it, the way the old Southern women used to do. Bones are the best fertilizer in the world for rosebushes.” He took the hoe and put it across his shoulder, and we started up Bloomingdale Road. We walked in the road; there are no sidewalks in Sandy Ground.
A little way up the road, we overtook an old man hobbling along on a cane. He and Mr. Hunter spoke to each other, and Mr. Hunter introduced him to me. “This is Mr. William E. Brown,” Mr. Hunter said. “He’s one of the old Sandy Ground oystermen. He’s in his eighties, but he’s younger than me. How are you, Mr. Brown?”
“I’m just hanging by a thread,” said Mr. Brown.
“Is it as bad as that?” asked Mr. Hunter.
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Mr. Brown, “only for this numbness in my legs, and I’ve got cataracts and can’t half see, and I had a dentist make me a set of teeth and he says they fit, but they don’t, they slip, and I had double pneumonia last winter and the doctor gave me some drugs that addled me. And I’m still addled.”
The 50s Page 8
